'Recent opinion polls indicate that the Tory lead over Labour is narrowing and that the General Election result is not a foregone conclusion', Nick Wright told the Communist Party's political committee on Wednesday evening.

'This is not only because Prime Minister May is a wooden performer who refuses to meet the public or debate with her opponents', the party's head of communications declared, 'it also reflects a Labour Party campaign which proposes working class policies at the expense of the rich and big business'.

He also welcomed Labour's pledges to build a million new homes over the next five years, half of them in the public sector, and to change the 'power imbalance' between bad landlords and the rapidly growing number of private rented tenants.

But Mr Wright warned that the prospects of winning a 'government of a new type' that would carry through an economic policy to challenge monopoly capitalist power are not yet bright enough.

'They require a working class that is prepared to fight and is organised to do so', he argued.

In particular, the labour movement needs to see itself as a force not only fighting for its collective aims within the current economic system, but then - on the basis of the inevitable class contradictions and confrontations - for the transition to a higher mode of production.

Responding to the latest demands of EU chief negotiatior Michel Barnier, the CP political committee rejected his 'incontestable' demands that Britain 'settle the accounts' by paying a huge divorce settlement fee in return for none of the assets, while abiding by rulings of the EU Court of Justice during and after negotiations.

Nick Wright said that the EU and many of its member states face a 'crisis of political institutions' because they could no longer offer concessions to the working class previously made possible during the long period of post-war reconstruction.

'Today, very few of the things that millions of people desire and that a left-led government might introduce can be won without challenging ruling class institutions, whether at national level or in the form of the EU, its overbearing Commission, the European Central Bank, the EU Court of Justice or the single European market', he pointed out.